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Comment by thenomad | Hacker News Reader

If I could feed this an article and have it generate headlines based on the text of that article (and they were any good), there is a solid chance I would pay real money for that service.

Headlines are an absolute pain, and as the article says, they're decidedly unoriginal most of the time. I can't see an obvious reason that an AI would be much worse at creating them as a human.

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Instead of generating random articles

  1. Generate click bait headlines
  2. Write suitable copy for them
  3. ???
  4. Profit

Where 3, of course, is "build ad network"

1a. Split-test. A lot.

I know of at least company which actually does this (tests headlines before writing the actual articles).

I've always wondered if sites do this the other way around. A site invests a lot in content they create you would think to get the most out of it they would serve it with different headlines to different demographics. Knowing from Facebook what headlines you have clicked through in the past can indicate how they should write future headlines to get you again.

Oh, they definitely do it the other way around extensively.

In the testing phase, what happens when you click the headline?

Sometimes it just loads a random article, sometimes it gives an error page.

And parts of 2. involves automatically farming out the writing to places like Fiverr..

That's absolutely easy:

<Random Unexpected Person> did <random unexpected action>, you wouldn't believe it!

There are many, many headline formulae in the world ( some of my favourites were written in the mid 1920s, in John Caples' book "Tested Advertising Methods" ) but they still take time to iterate through and hone for each article.

I'd like a robot to do that for me, please :)

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